Latin sources mention the presence of Jewish communities in Hispania as early as the first century of the common era.
Jewish funerary epigraphy of the Iberian Peninsula reveals the existence of synagogues in Mérida, Toledo, Barcelona, and other important cities. Rabbinic tradition traces the settlement of Jews in Spain back to the period of the First Temple. The Council of Elvira (300–306) contains the oldest Christian legislation concerning the Jews of Hispania, attesting to a structured Jewish presence and frequent interactions between communities. Under the Visigoths, the anti-Jewish legislation of King Sisebut (612) provoked massive forced conversions, foreshadowing the cycles of persecution that would mark the following centuries.
The Arab conquest of Hispania in 711 opened an extraordinary period for the Jews of the peninsula, often described as a “golden age” (ha-tequfa ha-zahavit). Under the Umayyads of Cordoba, families such as the ancestors of the Encaoua forged their scholarly identity. Hasdaï ibn Shaprut (915–970), physician and diplomat at the court of Abd al-Rahman III, embodies this cultural symbiosis. The great poets Shlomo ibn Gabirol, Yehuda Halevi, and Moshe ibn Ezra made Hebrew a language of high literature. It was in this intellectual soil that the first known generations of the Encaoua flourished.
Medieval Jewish Spain produced a constellation of thinkers whose influence on the Encaoua line was considerable. Maimonides (1138–1204), born in Cordoba, is the most illustrious: his Guide for the Perplexed and his Mishneh Torah are the philosophical and halakhic references that Éphraïm Al-Naqua would later defend in the Sha'ar Kevod Hashem. Nahmanides (1194–1270), of Girona, represents the mystical and kabbalistic current, in creative tension with Maimonidean rationalism. The Rashba (1235–1310) of Barcelona, the Rosh (1250–1327) of Toledo, and the Rivash (1326–1408, exiled to Algiers in 1391) form the chain of transmission in which the Encaoua are inscribed — at the crossroads of the Castilian, Aragonese, and Catalan traditions.
The Christian Reconquista, which gradually retook the Muslim territories between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, profoundly transformed the condition of the Jews of Spain. In the Christian kingdoms, the Jews initially enjoyed a relatively favorable condition — protected by kings who valued their fiscal, medical, and diplomatic skills. But from the fourteenth century onward, the rise of anti-Jewish preaching, the Black Death of 1348 (for which the Jews were blamed), and political instability created a climate of growing violence that culminated in the massacres of 1391. It was in this context that the Encaoua lived their final decades in Spain — a world where their rabbinic prestige no longer sufficed to protect them from popular fury.
The Jewish communities of Spain were organized around aljamas — autonomous communal units possessing their own religious, legal, and educational institutions. Each aljama was led by a council of notables and overseen by rabbis who exercised civil and religious jurisdiction over the members of the community. This system, recognized by the kings of Castile and Aragon, conferred considerable legal autonomy upon the Jews. The fiscal registers (pecheros) and communal ordinances (Takkanot) bear witness to an organized and flourishing Jewish life. It was within this institutional framework that the Encaoua exercised their rabbinic and judicial functions — a framework they would seek to reproduce in the Maghreb after the exiles of 1391 and 1492.